If Duvall Heeded Willie Brown's Advice, He'd Still Be in Assembly

If Mike Duvall took his marching orders from Willie Brown instead of Scott Baugh, the disgraced Yorba Linda Republican would still be a member of the state Assembly.

Baugh, chairman of the Orange County GOP, immediately called on Duvall to resign amid the sex-with-lobbyists scandal, and Duvall dutifully obliged.

But Brown, the liberal dean of California state Assembly speakers, says, "Republican Assemblyman Mike 'Spanky' Duvall's decision to resign over his open-mike bragging about his sexcapades with a Sacramento lobbyist was one of the dumbest moves I've ever seen."

Writing in his San Francisco Chronicle "Willie's World" column Sunday, Brown states that as soon as Duvall's seatmate, Assemblyman Jeff Miller, heard the sexed-up talk, the Mission Viejo Republican should have gone to his party's leadership and told them.

"The leadership should then have called in Duvall, stripped him of his committee assignments and thus taken the sting out of what was bound to be an embarrassing situation," Brown writes. "Instead, Duvall was a sitting duck when the tape was leaked."

Brown says he knows the the leak did not come from the Democratic side because Assembly Speaker Karen Bass didn't know about the tape until she got a call from NBC's Today show and, if the Democrats did had it, they would have kept the tape under wraps until October 2010, when Duvall would be in the middle of his re-election campaign."

This is where Brown demonstrates his lack of knowledge about OrangeCounty voters, because Slick Willie predicts that had the tape been released, it would have "blown him out of the water." Doesn't Brown know that it would take a lot more scandal than banging lobbyists to have a Democrat beat a Republican in that GOP-saturated district? Murdering someone, child rape or voting with Democrats on a tax increase immediately come to mind.

You can picture the tears hitting Willie's keyboard as he writes (or recites to an assistant), "Duvall's resignation means there will be no investigation into what was going on between him and the lobbyist, which means lawmakers will have a doubly tough time winning back public confidence in the Legislature."

He concludes by further explaining why it was dumb for Duvall to resign without a fight.

"Think about it. Where is he going to go? He can't go home, that's for sure. His wife will kill him."